You say that tonight you are going to go wild. It begins when you finish the last item of work at home that afternoon, and your boss replies: Received. Happy New Year. At that moment, smoke from the upstairs kitchen makes its way to you through an exhaust duct riddled with holes. Red-braised pork. Perhaps yellow croaker. From a household that firmly believes there must be fish every year, and deliberately breaks an IKEA plate while washing the dishes so that every shattering may bring peace. Perhaps it is the family upstairs to whom the child who always practices Pachelbel's Canon while you work from home belongs: every auspicious omen crammed into a narrow space before flowing through the broken duct and into your room, a family of three (soon to be four, after pleasurable, proper, concentrated marital sex). In any case, in the peculiar tone of the Spring Festival Gala, they remind you that New Year's Eve is almost here. You have told every friend that you are looking forward to the new year, because then you can? Then you can. Um. You falter. So every friend picks up where you leave off and says, Yes, you need to rest. Okay, I will, awwww, thanks babes. You cup your cheeks with both hands, the universally accepted expression of gratitude. But now New Year's Eve has arrived. You still do not know what you can do. You merely say that tonight you are going to go wild.

First comes the idea of indulgence, then the phrase go wild. Alcohol, cigarettes, and men are ideas you think of afterward, still the same examples your mother used in middle school when she described how far a woman could fall. You remember how absorbed she became in the description, as if possessed by a spell, her hands trembling. So tonight I am going to be a bad woman, you say. You think of women trapped inside their desires. You also think of the latter halves of their lives: their mouths held in the shape of resentment, their self-pity, the beatings from men, the sons who hollow them out, the dazed black-and-white photograph from their twenties pressed tightly to the chest. But only for tonight, you say. That makes you different from them. You are a woman who samples every experience life offers while maintaining a good life. It is only tonight that you indulge yourself.

You are at a misty age, an age difficult to call young or otherwise. Every day before the mirror, you test your skin's slackness with a fingertip. Some of your childhood friends have plainly entered the phase of losing their allure and becoming strong through motherhood. They have begun to wait for the day their husbands suddenly drop dead. Some of their sons and daughters already stand outside Will's Fitness and Wenfeng hair salons, listening to senior coworkers tell stories about how one seventy-year-old passerby can change your life. Yet other women, many years older than you, have used mysterious technologies from gray-market territories in Malaysia or the Philippines to reenter your age bracket. Maintenance. Discipline. Taking responsibility for your own face. These are the secrets they disclose for staying forever young. You alone have done nothing, so your stage is difficult to define. Everyone wants you to define it at once. You may not pretend you do not belong among them.

You tell your small handful of friends that tonight you are going to go wild. For the next half hour, you keep watch over your phone, waiting for everyone in the little group chat to send three thumbs-up, three fireworks, or you deserve it plus a rose. They are scattered between five and eight subway stops from you, with you as the center of the circle. There is also one exceptionally lonely queer man living at the city's edge, though he responds enthusiastically to every summons from every friend. You became friends through a chance work contact on WeChat. Then each of you added several friends made through other chance work contacts, and thus became a circle. Whenever they come to your room, you buy far too many ingredients in advance. You open a recipe app on your phone and your inbox on your computer, then wash and simmer and wait for them to arrive. Great, unpracticed clouds of cooking smoke pass through the broken duct into the positive-energy household upstairs, bringing the Canon to a temporary halt. Your friends arrive at the door about half an hour late, carrying a bouquet of flowers. Carrying a bag of cherries. Not long after they come in, they say this is the happiest evening they have had in ages.

After a few drinks, you allow yourself to tell them about your problems. Sorry, sorry. You always begin with an apology. You pause, pretending to be slightly drunk already and therefore careless of the proper distance between people, applying unnecessary moral pressure to the purity of the friendship. You say, Actually, um, it's just. For some time now you have been unable to fall asleep. A moment of silence. Then one friend says, You need to rest. Yes, yes, the others agree. You just need to rest. You are too hard on yourself. You go from one project to the next, one serious thing to the next. You cannot stop. During this, you try to describe the specifics of your condition, but the conversation has already moved to a more abstract plane. Family of origin. Workplace manipulation. Peer pressure. Contemporary life. One friend relays the exact words of a psychiatrist: vast numbers of city dwellers suffer from insomnia, and the sleep clinic sees an endless stream of patients every day. You clap your hands. Oh no, the strawberries are still soaking in the water. I'll go get them. Sorry, sorry, haha.

They have all gone home for the holiday. On New Year's Eve, you are alone. You cannot go home because your hometown has prohibited malicious homecoming. So you tell your mother that you cannot return maliciously and therefore cannot spend the new year with them. During the video call, you perform bewilderment, helplessness, and sorrow through faintly trembling eyebrows, lips pressed shut, eyes turned elsewhere. Fine, then, your mother sighs from the other side of the screen. You're out there all by yourself. Take good care of yourself. Don't make your mother worry, ah. Your mother can spend New Year's alone. It's fine. Even though your mother is old, and in poor health, and who knows how many years she has left. She can manage. She can manage. Don't worry, ah.

Your father, a man of few words, briefly shows his face at the end of the call. He has never expressed displeasure that you are a girl. Before your body fully developed, you even felt he was concealing your sex from himself. You owned only gender-neutral children's clothes. Your special talents were taekwondo and Mathematical Olympiad. Your hair was precisely the longest length a parent might permit on a boy. Then, during adolescence, he looked you over once, thoroughly and for so long that it made you uncomfortable. (A daughter, ah. Tsk. All grown up, he said.) After that he began calculating whether further investment in your education was necessary. The associated household spending continued only because your mother insisted. Your parents started sleeping in separate rooms over it, though they did not divorce.

You cannot say that your mother is a stern person. That would not be accurate. Even at your present age, you spend much time considering her nature and her motives. She does not count as stern because she never uses a stern tone. She does not control you through explosions or hysteria. But she is, as you have inherited, a superb actress. She describes the fallen adult woman with emotion, shaping her hands into the curves that emphasize sexual characteristics, linking wantonness to alcohol, cigarettes, and men. Playing cards, mahjong, short skirts, brightly colored shoes, mobile phones, cartoons, and extracurricular books are the switches that turn wantonness on. She sits beside you and gathers your hand between hers, looks straight into your eyes, her chest rising and falling dramatically as she recounts the terrible consequences of anything done without her permission, until you can no longer bear the heat of her love and turn your eyes away. Then she leaves your room. But at night, she will suddenly open the door and come in again. You remember the light snapping on while you slept and then snapping off. In your memory, she surveys the room to make sure that nothing except your growing bones has changed.

You have had wild fantasies. It happened at a workshop in the outskirts, recommended by a friend who said that the three thousand yuan had changed her life and would change yours too. An amiable woman who rarely spoke sat among young men and women hungry to be saved. She never mentioned her own winding, not entirely unmiraculous path to enlightenment, allowing only her assistants to disclose it. As she uttered phrases like Krishnamurti and arhat nirvana, you thought of a filthy naked man, so hairy he was nearly apelike, exuding an unclean air as if after every act of intercourse he never washed but wiped the bodily fluids onto the tip of his tongue. Oh, every friend present, please close your eyes, the amiable woman said, taking the hands of the friends to your left and right. Pairs of hands immediately groped through the air for other floating fingers. You closed your eyes and saw the naked man again. He paid attention only to the changes in his penis, yet he was approaching you. He was attracted to you. Something that belonged uniquely to you had attracted this filthy man. Now, please repeat after me, said the amiable woman. I have reconciled with myself. I am one with the world.

Tonight you are going to go wild. This is your goal. You wander around the room and cook yourself a bowl of noodles. While they boil, you watch a great many short videos. You laugh with more abandon than usual. Then, as slowly as you possibly can, you finish the bowl of noodles. You send your mother a message informing her that tonight you are going to go wild. You have many ideas, but this is the only message you send. She did not reply. So you asked her again: Is that okay?